A collaboration between USF Contemporary Art Museum and Community Stepping Stones, The Music Box: Tampa Bay is an interactive public art project by visiting talents from New Orleans Airlift (NOA), who fuse architecture, engineering, history and music-making techniques to create an immersive performance space/exploration site of temporary structures with imbedded instrumentation designed to produce sounds when engaged and experimented upon. The Music Box, located along Hillsborough River in Sulphur Springs, is free and open to the public, as is a slate of unique concerts and cultural programming that includes musical and spoken word performances, open mics, jam sessions, artist talks and lectures, and guided tours. For its opening weekend, bass-banging extraordinaire Ray ‘rayzilla’ Villadonga conducts an all-star cast of local players dubbed ‘The Modified Mosquito Massive’ (Fri.-Sat., March 25-26, 7 p.m.), while the first artist talk, on how the creations came to be, happens 2 p.m. March 26. The site is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Thurs., noon-6 p.m. Sun., March 25-April 17, with concerts 7:30 p.m. Fri.-Sat., and cultural programming 6-8 p.m. Thurs., Community Stepping Stones at Mann-Wagnon Park, 1101 E. River Cove St., Tampa. Admission is free, but tickets are required via Eventbrite; more info at facebook.com/MusicBoxTampaBay.
This article appears in Mar 24-30, 2016.